For drama to be deemed safe, it's best if it is about the past. Jimmy McGovern, the best television screenwriter around, has been attacked by Tim Collins, the colonel who became a celebrity for a rousing address to his troops on the eve of the Iraq war. What drew the retired colonel's ire is an episode to be screened next week in the current Accused series about the consequences of two squaddies disobeying orders in Afghanistan. He called it irresponsible and desperate to shock. He said the drama abjectly failed soldiers who were risking their lives on the frontline. McGovern got the same treatment for his drama about Bloody Sunday, which was also accused of being one-sided, selective with the facts, and over the top in its depiction of violence. Eamonn McCann, one of the organisers of the civil rights protest, wrote at the time of the film's first screening that the hostility to it – and to another television drama on the same events by Paul Greengrass – arose not from concern for the truth, but from an unwillingness to acknowledge it. After the findings of the Saville inquiry few would now say that McGovern's drama Sunday was particularly overstated. Those events are long gone, but the war in Afghanistan will drag on for some time. Do we have to wait three decades before it creates drama that is challenging to watch? McGovern should be applauded and defended from the charge that he is being unpatriotic. Viewers should decide for themselves where the truth about this conflict lies, and who is being patriotic about telling it.